CMU to Develop Commercial Mining Robots

According to a CMU news release, CMU's Robotics Institute has entered a five year agreement with Anglo American PLC to develop autonomous robots for a variety of mining tasks including mapping and inspection. From the news release:

Automating the most difficult, costly and dangerous mining jobs will improve safety and increase the productivity and efficiency of Anglo American’s operations. Advances in robotics will allow the mining of hard-to-reach ore deposits that cannot be economically extracted under existing methods and mine layouts

Mining is a very dangerous business and seems like an ideal job for robots. The robot pictured above is a multi-purpose mining robot that is being developed at the Robotics Institute NREC facility. More information can be found in the NREC new release. The technology described here is probably descended from the CMU Groundhog mine-mapping robot that we've reported on as far back as 2002.